Ecclesiastes 12

Ecclesiastes 12

King James Version, The Holy Bible

1 Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;

2 While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:

3 In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened,

4 And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low;

5 Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:

6 Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

7 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

History

A wooden prop in the margins, beautifully employed to support a bit of text that has overrun the end of the line - 15th century, Birgitta of Sweden, British Library, Harley MS 612, f. 50r pic.twitter.com/rjeZDsunKZ

— Medieval Military Medicine (@MedMilMedicine) March 1, 2025

 

An Insight

Ignorance is more contagious than knowledge; folly spreads more quickly than wisdom; left untended, the garden fills with weeds, not roses.

— Paul J. Pastor (@pauljpastor) March 2, 2025

 

I see wonderful things

Before I go to work I want to tell you about a type of Soldier in the military that is near and dear to my heart. I have so many stories to tell about these folks but this one chokes me up to this day:

I was testing to get my Expert Infantryman's Badge awhile back at Fort… pic.twitter.com/ZcAVY39xgV

— InfantryDort (@infantrydort) March 4, 2025

 

Offbeat Humor

If you think Trump was the angry one, you’ve clearly never met a Cuban American and experienced this stare. pic.twitter.com/0GrQVEyCDF

— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) February 28, 2025

 

Data Talks

Operational productivity of public transit has plummeted in the wake of remote work; and so greater efficiencies through automation and competitive procurement are essential to getting transit to work

Transit mode share is just 1.4% https://t.co/XhMPY56jyZ

— Arpit Gupta (@arpitrage) March 1, 2025

 

Atlas and the Sea by Alexander Volkov

Atlas and the Sea by Alexander Volkov (Russia/America, 1960 - )

Click to enlarge.

The Purpose of a System is What It Does

From The Purpose of a System is What It Does by Charles Fain Lehman.  The subheading is Review: Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.  

A very substantiative review.  It reviews the book as a book and then the book as portfolio of ideas and finally the book as a process.  

Some points:

Abundance, the new and much discussed work from the NYT’s Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, is a book with two distinct visions. The authors would like to believe that these are, if not one and the same, then reconcilable. Unfortunately, they are not.

The first way to understand Abundance is as an intra-coalitional argument. Klein and Thompson are (they take great pains to remind us) liberals. And the book’s primary audience is fellow liberals, with the goal of galvanizing one side of an intra-liberal debate while chastising another.

In Klein and Thompson’s view, the liberal agenda is in conflict with itself. On the one hand, liberals want the state to deliver many goods and services efficiently and universally. They want health care and roads and houses and science funding and so on. Most importantly, they want the state to solve big problems: to fix climate change and disease and poverty and the rest.

On the other hand, liberals also want to regulate the processes by which these things are produced. They want to make sure that the housing is produced in a way that is not disruptive of community character, or doesn’t hand too much profit over to business. They want to make sure the solar panels are not constructed in a way that disrupts anyone’s view, or hurts endangered species. They want to distribute life-saving medication, but in a way that promotes racial equity.

Klein and Thompson think that liberals have leaned too heavily into this regulatory agenda, in a way that stifles the production of the things they want the state to produce.  

[snip]

This version of Abundance—a book about the idea that liberalism needs to get out of its own way—is fundamentally laudable. I am not in Klein and Thompson’s coalition, obviously. But I agree with many of their goals: I want more houses, more renewable energy, more scientific innovation, etc. And I am glad that someone from within their coalition wrote a book making their argument to fellow coalition members. I think America is a better place with a liberalism that wants to build than with a liberalism that wants to choke building off at the root. Abundance is a book that will get people talking about the right problems, and for that alone it deserves praise.

What I am not sold on, however, is the idea of a liberalism that builds.

This is the second way of reading Abundance: as a claim about what the state ought to do. When Klein and Thompson talk about a “politics of abundance,” they are envisioning a far more aggressive role for the state in the actual process of making things—of building—than it currently occupies.

[snip]

There’s a phrase from systems thinking that gets used frequently on Twitter X: “the purpose of a system is what it does.” As coiner Stafford Beer put it, there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” The liberal state constantly fails to build. Why should we think that’s what it’s supposed to be doing?

Rather, a better way to understand the everything bagel phenomenon is as coalition management.4 It’s not that the IRA got passed or public housing gets built in spite of the giveaways and procedural requirements layered on top. It’s that the IRA got passed or public housing gets built because of the giveaways and procedural requirements layered on top. The pay-offs to and carveouts for unions and local agitators and everyone else exist because that’s how you make sure things actually get done. In their absence, those people exercise the vetos that are inherent to the state building in a democratic society.

The idea generalizes. The fact that California spent billions of dollars without producing usable high-speed rail (a favorite foil of abundance liberals) can be viewed as an accident. But it is more parsimonious to say that California succeeded at its goal—allocating billions of dollars to innumerable contractors and private interests—and, incidentally, some train tracks were eventually constructed.

[snip]

A “politics of abundance” is an oxymoron. Politics is for the divvying up of the fruits of actual productivity, sometimes well and sometimes poorly. To ask it to do the work of production is to miss what it is for.

from The World by Henry Vaughar

from The World

by Henry Vaughar

I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

And all her train were hurl’d.

 

History

Did you guys know that the word "daily" in the Lord's Prayer is a wild-guess translation of a Greek word found nowhere else but in the Gospels, and no one actually knows what it means??? pic.twitter.com/YKhaNKKImT

— SatanWatch 👿 (@_SatanWatch) February 28, 2025